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Archive for November, 2010

A bookstore owner from Yolo County, a retired engineer from Claremont, an insurance agent from San Gabriel and an attorney from Norco are among those who will determine how legislative districts are drawn as part of an experiment that promises to drastically change the state’s political landscape.

Until now, the boundaries of legislative and congressional districts were drawn every 10 years by state legislators in a process that critics said was often skewed for partisan advantage or to protect incumbents. Many officeholders have been able to skate from election to election without much in the way of serious competition.

But through a series of ballot measures, California voters have set the state on a radically different course with an unknown outcome. In 2008, voters gave the job of drawing legislative district lines to a new Citizens Redistricting Commission. This month, voters gave the commission additional powers, handing them authority over congressional districts. And Thursday, the first members of that new commission were picked by lottery.

The new NationalJournal.com has “a list of the 10 lawmakers who will have to worry most about their own political survival in 2012 thanks to redistricting” along with a few honorable mentions.

There’s no bigger development in 2011 that will affect the political landscape than the decennial process of redrawing the district boundaries for members of the House. In 22 states, it’s a process steeped in partisanship — with one party holding unilateral control of the process, thanks to majorities in the state legislature.

From 1998 to 2008, longtime Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich won each of his reelection campaigns by at least 49,000 votes. Even in the Democratic bloodbath that was the 2010 midterms, the former mayor of Cleveland and presidential candidate carried his district in northeast Ohio by a 16,000-vote margin, more than 8 percent. So why should he be worried about 2012?

Because it’s redistricting season again, the time when legislators redraw district boundaries based on new census data, and Republicans in Ohio are holding the pen. The Ohio GOP won the governor’s seat and took over the state legislature in the midterms, part of a nationwide statehouse surge that has placed Republicans in charge of redrawing congressional-district lines in 17 states, which account for a full 193 out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives, including all the seats from the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Come 2011, the GOP will control more state legislatures than at any time since 1928. … the nationwide map holds little good news for Democrats when it comes to redistricting.

The stakes could hardly be higher: control of the Senate hangs in the balance, and to the majority party goes outsized influence over the once-a-decade process to redraw district lines in New York.

The process is heavy on politics. After the completion of the U.S. Census, lawmakers in the Assembly and Senate revise the intricate district maps that define their constituencies. In past redistricting efforts, lawmakers in control of the process have adopted artful, demographic-savvy strategies in a bid to create safe seats for incumbents and expand the reach of the majority party.

Nathan Gonzales writes in the latest The Rothenberg Political Report that “Democrats couldn’t have picked a worse year to get hit with a political wave at the state level” noting “The surge of 2010 puts Republicans in total control of redrawing congressional maps for more than 40 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives.”

For months, Democratic strategists privately expressed concern that the party had the expertise and resources to stem the GOP tide in some federal races, but there wasn’t enough attention on races further down the ballot. Their nightmare came true on Tuesday.

The GOP picked up 19 chambers, giving it control of 56 out of 98 partisan legislative chambers in the country. More important, Republicans control both chambers in 26 states (up from 15 before the election), including some key redistricting states. In 20 of those states they also control the governorship.

“Of the 18 states that are going to gain or lose seats in reapportionment, Republicans now have majorities in 10 of those states,” said Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican State Leadership Committee, who predicted that the GOP could gain 15 to 25 House seats through redistricting.

Every state will redraw its congressional map, even if it doesn’t gain or lose a seat due to population growth or loss. In most states, the legislature is in charge of drawing the lines, and in 39 states it has the power to veto a new map or the authority to appoint a redistricting commission.

“If you are a political party, you never want to have a really bad election,” said veteran political handicapper Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report. “But if you’re gonna have one, you really don’t want to have it in a year that ends in a zero.”